FILICIDE: Ontario: Nichelle Boothe-Row charged with manslaughter

 Jun 4 2011   Oakland Ross Feature Writer

Shakeil Boothe, 10, was found dead late last month in the Brampton home he shared with his father and stepmother, both of whom have been charged in his death.

Handout

 

His name was Shakeil — Arabic for “handsome.”
He loved to play soccer.
His favourite meal consisted of rice and peas with chicken — sometimes referred to as Jamaica’s national dish. He dreamt of becoming a scientist one day. Shy but welcoming, he usually greeted close friends and relatives with a hug. And yet Shakeil Boothe — aged 10 years, nine months — was allegedly fatally beaten in Brampton late last month, his injuries left unreported for two days before his death.
Now, more than a week later, almost nobody who knew him has any idea how, or why, it happened.
“We haven’t a clue,” a Jamaican relative of the slain boy said Saturday, following an hour-long memorial service at a Pentecostal church in a leafy neighbourhood of Brampton, on a wet and gloomy afternoon in spring.
The woman said she had travelled from Jamaica for the service, along with Keneisha Moore, the boy’s anguished mother. She wouldn’t give her name.
As for Shakeil’s mother herself — a tall, striking woman with long black hair in a black mourning dress — she told a reporter before the service she might be willing to make some remarks later, but that proved impossible.
Moore wept in silence throughout the memorial and was still overcome with grief when it ended, clutching at her son’s casket after it was placed in the back of a hearse and unable to walk or stand without the assistance of others. She sobbed almost without a break.
When a reporter briefly approached her, Moore merely gazed back, uncomprehending. Several companions politely pointed out the obvious — the woman was far too distraught to speak.
Shakeil’s father, Brampton resident Garfield Boothe, aged 31, is currently behind bars, charged with second-degree murder and failing to provide the necessities of life.
His present wife, Nichelle Boothe-Row, 28, is also in detention, charged with manslaughter.
The charges were laid last week, several days after Peel police found Shakeil’s lifeless body in the home he shared with his father, stepmother, and an 8-month-old half brother on Homeland Ct. near the corner of Dixie Rd. and Howden Blvd. in Brampton.On Saturday, about 80 friends or relatives of Shakeil’s family celebrated the boy’s brief life and mourned his premature death at the North Park Worship Centre in Brampton’s east end.
Several, including the boy’s mother, had travelled from Jamaica for the purpose.
The others — mainly but not exclusively members of the local Jamaican community — wanted to pay their respects to a boy they may not have known personally, but whose death has affected them deeply.
“We’re here to support the family,” said Beverly Adams, a family friend. “They’re great people. This is a very unfortunate circumstance. I’m very shocked. It’s a child involved.”
Others wondered how a youngster could find himself in such deadly peril without anyone outside his immediate family circle being aware.
“You hear shouting at night — it might not be anything — but see if it’s okay,” said Jasmine, an employee at Humber River Regional Hospital, where she works alongside the boy’s step-grandmother. She would not provide her last name. “If it’s a kid, observe the kid. You’ve got to be very involved.”
Another woman named Bev, who also would give only her first name, said she was mystified that no warning signs were either noted or heeded in advance of Shakeil’s death.
“How come they didn’t know what was happening to this little boy?” she said, speaking of those around him.
A nurse by profession, Bev also said it may have been a mistake to bring Shakeil to Canada, while his mother remained behind in Portland, Jamaica.
“Separating the child from his biological mother can affect the child,” she said. “I don’t believe in separation, especially from the mother.”
But, two years ago, Shakeil and his mother were parted.
Born on Sept. 5, 2000, the boy attended Bradford Preparatory School in Buff Bay in Jamaica and also went to Sunday religious services at the White Gate Church.
In April 2009, however, when Shakeil was just 8, his father arranged to bring the boy to Canada in order to improve his professional and economic prospects.
To judge by the recollections and impressions of people attending Saturday’s memorial, the plan worked out well at first or, at least, it seemed to.
Friends and relatives remembered Shakeil as a shy but apparently happy child with his own way of doing things.
On one occasion, according to an account provided Saturday by a teacher at the Hanover Road Public School where the boy was in Grade 4, Shakeil got up in the middle of a mathematics class and went off by himself to read a book.
Called to task by his understandably perplexed teacher, Shakeil calmly explained that he simply felt like reading his book.
No one, it seems, anticipated the bleak fate that awaited the boy.
“We live in a cruel world,” said Pastor Andy Miller, who delivered a sermon toward the end of the memorial service. “What was done to him — what was done to him — is not right. But I thank God he doesn’t have to go through that pain any longer.”
Shakeil’s body is to be flown back to the country of his birth as soon as the paperwork is done. He is to be buried at the Orange Bay Cemetery in Portland, Jamaica.
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1002931--community-mourns-brampton-boy-s-brutal-death

INFANTICIDE: Ontario Appeals Court upholds law

Mar 2 2011

Tracey Tyler Legal Affairs Reporter

The Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled that women accused of deliberately killing their newborn children can defend themselves by arguing the crime was infanticide, caused by a mental disturbance such as postpartum depression.
In a 3-0 decision Wednesday, the court dismissed a Crown appeal in the case of a Guelph woman known as L.B., who admitted to smothering her two infant sons but avoided a murder conviction and life sentence after arguing the crime was infanticide.
Although infanticide is punishable by up to five years in prison, L.B. was given credit for pre-trial custody and sentenced to one year in jail.
In appealing her convictions, Ontario’s attorney general, for all practical purposes, sought to abolish infanticide as a partial defence to a murder charge.
The Crown’s motivations were unclear, but appeared to flow from concerns the Criminal Code’s infanticide provisions are based on myths that women can’t control their hormones, and are allowing morally culpable killers to get away with murder.
It defines infanticide as a woman willfully causing the death of a newborn child in circumstances where she hasn’t fully recovered from the effects of childbirth or lactation and her mind is disturbed.
Wednesday’s decision is the first critical analysis of Canada’s infanticide provisions by an appeal court.
Like earlier legislation in Britain, Canada’s infanticide law, enacted in 1948, was a compromised by parliamentarians who knew that juries were often sympathetic to women on trial for the deaths of their children and unwilling to convict them of murder, particularly if it was punishable by execution, said Justice David Doherty, who wrote today’s judgment.
“In the few cases where juries did convict, judges balked at engaging in what was described as a ‘black cap farce,’ requiring judges to pronounce a death penalty knowing that the penalty was a monstrous overreaction to the crime and that it would never be carried out,” he said.
“This ‘solemn mockery’ was said to do nothing other than terrorize the mother on whom it was pronounced as she was probably the only person in the courtroom who did not know that the penalty would never be carried out,” Doherty wrote.
In Canada, 86 women have been charged with infanticide since 1977.
L.B. admitted while undergoing treatment at the Homewood Mental Health Centre that she had suffocated one son in 1998 and the other child in 2002, telling police later that she was “really confused” and “fighting with her thoughts” and that she was trying to help them.
She had grown up in an abusive home, had attempted suicide and was 17 when her first son died.
She was charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
While infanticide is available as a partial defence to murder in other countries, including England, the Crown argued the infanticide provisions in Canada’s Criminal Code operate only as an offence that women can be charged with.
Writing on behalf of Justices Michael Moldaver and Eleanore Cronk, Doherty said Parliament clearly intended to make infanticide a partial defence to murder when it enacted the legislation in 1948 and the proof was in the language.
It said homicides that would normally constitute murder or manslaughter would not be “deemed” as such when a woman’s actions fit the infanticide criteria.
Doherty rejected the Crown’s contention that Parliament removed infanticide as a defence when it rewrote the legislation in 1954, taking out the “deeming provision.”
“It would take strong evidence to satisfy me that parliament intended to abandon the very purpose behind the infanticide legislation less than six years after enacting that legislation,” he said, “and that it intended to give to the prosecutorial authorities, through their charging discretion, the exclusive power to determine whether a mother who killed her newborn child could be convicted of infanticide and not murder.”
http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/article/947213--infanticide-defence-available-to-mothers-who-kill-court-rules?bn=1

INFANTICIDE: Ontario appeals court upholds the legal concept

KIRK MAKIN  Mar. 02, 2011

The Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled that mothers who kill their infants while in the grips of a mental disturbance deserve leniency and should not be subjected to an automatic life sentence for murder.

The ruling this morning turned back a determined attempt by the Ontario Crown to remove infanticide as a shield in baby slayings.
The rarely used lesser offence usually results in sentences of a few months at most compared to the automatic life sentence that accompanies a murder conviction.
The decision meant the difference between a year in jail and life imprisonment for a young woman, identified only as L.B., who had admitted to killing two of her children and was convicted of infanticide.
On appeal, prosecutor Jennifer Woollcombe argued that it should not have been open to L.B.’s trial judge to acquit the young woman of first-degree murder and find her guilty only of the lesser offence.
“Choosing between the two characterizations of infanticide has profound importance in a case like this one where a mother is charged with murdering her child,” Mr. Justice David Doherty observed Wednesday, writing on behalf of Mr. Justice Michael Moldaver and Madam Justice Eleanore Cronk.
Judge Doherty concluded that, after a rigorous survey of legislation since the 1940s, Parliament introduced the infanticide to exist as a safety valve in the case of new mothers who become unbalanced.
“That introduction was precipitated by the perceived need to give juries trying murder cases involving mothers who killed their children an alternative to a murder verdict that more accurately reflected the jury’s sense of the true culpability of the mother,” he said.
“It would take strong evidence to satisfy me that Parliament intended to abandon the very purpose behind the infanticide legislation less than six years after enacting that legislation, and that it intended to give to the prosecutorial authorities, through their charging discretion, the exclusive power to determine whether a mother who killed her newborn child could be convicted of infanticide and not murder,” he said.
“Whether the infanticide provision should continue to so operate, and if so under what terms, raises difficult policy questions,” Judge Doherty said. “Those questions are for Parliament and not the court.”
The ruling was a victory for defence counsel Timothy Breen and James Fleming, as well as a legal intervener, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund.
L.B. was not charged until a couple of years after the morning her baby was found dead in his crib. The death was presumed to be accidental. However, L.B. admitted in 2005 that she had killed not just that baby, but another infant who had died two years earlier under similar circumstances.
L.B., who had already served two and a half years in pretrial custody, was ultimately convicted of infanticide and sentenced to a total of 18 months in jail with three years on probation. She was also to notify child-welfare agencies if she became pregnant any time in the next 20 years.
Ms. Woollcombe argued at the appeal that it mocks a child's death for her killer to be spared a life sentence for murder. She said that an out-and-out psychopath could murder her infant and get off with a relative slap on the wrist simply by exaggerating her “baby blues.”
In another scenario, the prosecutor offered the court, any woman with a pre-existing mental disorder can simply claim that it was exacerbated by giving birth. “It is going to be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, for the Crown to charge or convict women who kill babies under a year old, of murder,” she said.
Ms. Woollcombe argued that infanticide should considered only when a judge or jury first concludes that the Crown has failed to make out the essential ingredients of a murder prosecution. She said that this would allow mothers who suffer from genuine mental disturbances to be acquitted of murder, while at the same time making intentional killers serve an appropriate penalty.
However, Mr. Breen insisted that infanticide serves as a vital outlet for judges and juries who realize that a mother overwhelmed by post-partum depression can do the unthinkable – take her own child's life.
The infanticide law evolved decades ago because juries stubbornly refused to convict young mothers of murder, knowing that they might be led away to the scaffold, he said.
“Infanticide can be seen as the leading edge of legal reform that came before the abolition of the death penalty,” Mr. Breen argued. “It is a concession to human frailty; to mental disorders that can result from childbirth. The death penalty is the elephant in this room. It explains the development of infanticide's proper interpretation as a defence.”
Punishable by up to five years in jail, only a handful of infanticide sentences are handed out each year. However, the profound questions of culpability, mercy and maternal love that they raise loom far out of proportion to their number.
Judge Doherty emphasized that mothers who kill their babies will not walk away unscathed. If there is no evidence of a mental disturbance capable, he said, she will be open to a murder or manslaughter conviction.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/court-upholds-infanticide-defence-for-mentally-ill-mothers-who-kill-babies/article1926643/

FILICIDE: Ontario: Melissa Alexander convicted for manslaughter

CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD |  Feb. 14, 2011

It is a curious country, this one, that you can be convicted of killing your child and still you get to walk out of the courtroom, free as a bird.

That’s what happened on Monday at Ontario Superior Court in Toronto.

Melissa Alexander was convicted of manslaughter in the scalding death of her 19-month-old son, Miguel, who died of massive third-degree immersion burns that his mommy dearest slathered with Vaseline and cotton batting, at some point tossing some of the little boy’s sloughed-off skin into the garbage can, before she left him and his nearly three-year-old brother, Shawn, in their apartment to go shopping.
That little excursion was part of Ms. Alexander’s failure to get the baby any medical attention for what was clearly a catastrophic injury. She phoned 911 only early the next day, by which time he was dead.
Although all the evidence is that the young woman was alone with the children that whole day and probably dunked the boy into a scalding hot tub, an earlier charge of second-degree murder was dismissed by another judge after a preliminary hearing.
Ms. Alexander was committed to trial only for manslaughter, the allegation centring not on what she probably did, but on what she didn’t, that in other words she caused Miguel’s death by failing to provide what in law is called “the necessaries of life,” which includes proper medical care.
God forbid her bail should be revoked while she awaits sentencing just because of that. Heavens no.
Only the terrific, hard-nosed judge, Anne Molloy, even raised the possibility. She asked about the terms of the bail imposed when Ms. Alexander was first charged in the fall of 2007.
Crown prosecutor Barry Stagg mistakenly replied that it was “a house arrest bail,” only to be corrected by Ms. Alexander’s lawyer, Catherine Currie, who told the judge it was in fact a surety bail put up by Ms. Alexander’s grandmother.
Mr. Stagg, roused to action by the judge’s question, then suggested that if Ms. Alexander wasn’t “asked to step into custody,” then perhaps Judge Molloy ought to impose a more restrictive bail.
“Into custody? Why?” Judge Molloy asked, hopeful it appeared that the prosecutor might have an answer and at least make the case, which is just what many prosecutors would have done.
Mr. Stagg muttered weakly about “the severity of the offence,” but in the same breath admitted Ms. Alexander has “been on a bail a long time and there’s been no difficulty.”
The judge asked about Miguel’s surviving brother, and if Ms. Alexander had access to him; she doesn’t. Left with a prosecutor who seemed indifferent, a defence lawyer who was strongly arguing against jail and with no small person to protect, Judge Molloy had little room to manoeuvre.
She then asked about tightening up the bail, and Mr. Stagg suggested Ms. Alexander report in once a week to the authorities.
Ms. Currie immediately objected. Judge Molloy asked what Ms. Alexander was doing now, “on a daily basis” that would make such a condition so onerous.
Ms. Currie said Ms. Alexander “has been employed and she’s looking for a job” and exploring her educational options.
In other words, she’s doing sweet boo all, a fact which didn’t escape the judge, who arched a brow and imposed the reporting condition. Sentencing was set for April 19.
The judge found that Ms. Alexander, now 25, was the only person who “had direct knowledge of the extent of his [Miguel’s] distress”; that she lied like a rug to everybody about how it had happened (she said the baby had pulled a pot of boiling water onto himself); that she robbed him of his “last hope of survival” when she deceived his dad, Sergio Fernandes, about the extent of the injury; that Miguel would have been screaming and utterly inconsolable and that “going shopping for two hours instead of taking him to a hospital is nothing short of shocking.”
Judge Molloy said that when Ms. Alexander left to hit the mall, probably around 1 p.m. that day, it’s possible Miguel “was still screaming in agony” or possible “that his body was already going into shock and he was starting down the path towards unconsciousness. Either scenario is disturbing.”
The little guy didn’t have much of a life. He was taken into care by the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto shortly after he was born, as Mary McConville, the agency executive director, confirmed to The Globe and Mail in a recent interview. He remained in care for more than six months before being returned to Ms. Alexander, who by then had moved in with Sergio.
Theoretically, the agency was still supervising the baby at the time of his death.
Maria Fernandes, Miguel’s paternal grandmother, remembers the day he was born. “I didn’t even know she was pregnant,” she told The Globe on Monday, but then Sergio said that, “She [Ms. Alexander] doesn’t want him” and asked her to come to the hospital.
It took her 20 minutes to get down there; by then, she said, Ms. Alexander had handed him over to the CCAS. Ms. Fernandes released balloons, including a teddy bear, outside the courthouse on Monday in honour of what would have been Miguel’s fifth birthday, last Friday.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/christie-blatchford/criminal-neglect-not-enough-to-keep-mom-behind-bars/article1907148/

FILICIDE: Ontario: Tammy Marquardt's conviction quashed

Tammy Marquardt speaks to reporters after the hearing Photo by: Kevin Misener/680News

Tammy Marquardt (seen with William Mullins-Johnson) leaves the court after her conviction was quashed Photo by: Kevin Misener/680News

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Kevin Misener Feb 10, 2011

TORONTO, Ont. - The Ontario Court of Appeal threw out the conviction against Tammy Marquardt, Thursday.
The 38-year-old mother spent 13 years in prison for the death of her son based on the test of disgraced former pathologist, Charles Smith.
Smith had concluded Marquardt's son was smothered to death. Other experts have since come forward to say that the boy likely died after an epileptic seizure.
Defence lawyer James Lockyer says Smith dismissed the child's epilepsy as a possible cause.
"He kept seeing murder when it wasn't there." said Lockyer, "A child dies at 2-and-a-half years of age and he's epileptic and he's been suffering numerous seizures in the proceeding months, common sense says that's what he died of."
The court ruled, Thursday, Marquardt's conviction was a miscarriage of justice.
Marquardt has always insisted she did not kill her two-year-old son Kenneth and said she welcomes a new trial, if the Crown decides to pursue it.
"In my heart, I know the truth, and the truth will prevail," she said.
Marquardt said her life since 1995, when she was convicted, has been a nightmare, and that with this new ruling, she feels as though she is starting to wake up
http://www.680news.com/news/local/article/181695--ontario-s-top-court-quashes-mom-s-conviction-in-child-death

FILICIDE: Ontario: Nadine Bernard sentenced to life in prison for murdering her own child

Jan 14 2011

 

An undated photograph of Jayden Bernard. His mother, Nadine Bernard, pleaded guilty to his murder on Friday, Jan. 14, 2011. She was sentenced to life in prison.

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Bob Mitchell Staff Reporter

On March 11, 2009, Nadine Bernard told a co-worker she would rather kill her baby boy than watch the baby’s father and wife raise him. She meant it. Less than three weeks later, Bernard hooked a hose to the exhaust of her car and put it into the rear window near her 18-month-old son, Jayden, then waited until the carbon monoxide fumes took his life. Bernard pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to an automatic life prison sentence on Friday. Jayden was an innocent victim used as a pawn in a deteriorating custody battle, Crown prosecutor Sandra Caponecchia told a Brampton court. Eighteen months old, the baby was born as the result of an affair between Bernard, 34, and Richard Williams, her co-worker at Brinks Canada. Caponecchia described how Williams initially hid Jayden’s existence from his wife, Joy. After she discovered Jayden’s Christening card, Williams ended his affair. Bernard then blocked his attempts to see Jayden — whom he had visited when his wife, a pediatric nurse, was at work — so Williams went to court for access. He won partial custody, devastating Bernard. In addition to killing Jayden, she may have had other plans. When investigators searched her car, they found a handwritten letter. “This is just an early note to wish you and your family a wonderful Christmas. My Christmas gift to you this year is to take everything you love away from you. That includes your wife and kids,” Bernard wrote in the note, which appeared to be for Williams. “The kid outside of wedlock counts too. My plan to destroy you is working perfectly. I will not rest until my plan is executed . . . Payback is a bitch.” Bernard didn’t suffer from any mental illness. By all accounts, she was a hard worker at Brinks and a good mother to her two other children from a previous relationship, who are now 13 and 16. But she was suffering from a depressive episode when she murdered her son, court heard. After a Thanksgiving trip, Bernard made a false report to police that Joy Williams had left a threatening note on her car. After being denied access to Jayden, Williams got a court date for March 12, 2009 and access was granted for every Thursday and Sunday. Bernard refused. She quit her job on March 23. Three days later, instead of delivering Jayden as agreed, Bernard purchased a 10-foot black dishwasher hose and a roll of duct tape at a Home Hardware store and drove her son to the underground parking garage at 1 Robert Speck Dr. in Mississauga. Bernard and Williams worked in the building and Jayden also attended the daycare there. Bernard entered the parking garage at 9:36 a.m. and parked her car in a spot at 11:36 a.m. and connected the hose between the exhaust pipe and the rear window where Jayden’s car seat was located. Surveillance footage shows the car remained in its spot throughout the day and night until the next morning, when Bernard moved it to another spot, the hose no longer attached. She called 911 at 7:50 a.m. She declined to perform CPR after telling the operator her baby was dead. Bernard also tried but failed to kill herself. Police found her confused; she had urinated in her clothes. She told officers that she had fallen asleep with Jayden in her arms. A sticky note taped to the centre console of the car read: “Mom and Dad. I am sorry. This is the only way I could protect Jayden from Richard and Joy.” Defence lawyer John Struthers agreed the case was a tragedy for both families but insisted what happened that day was totally out of character. He said Williams misled her about his family situation. She believed her lover had had a vasectomy; her pregnancy was unplanned. For Williams, the heartache, anguish and guilt will never end. “What God allows this evil to be perpetrated on our children?” Williams said while delivering his victim impact statement. “Which God heard his silent cry for help while this monstrosity was set on him and didn't allow him to be saved? “What God allows such an angel to be surrounded by so much hate and evil until it suffocates him? “It breaks my heart to know that after four months of being denied access to my son by his mother, it was at a funeral home that I gave him his last hug.” Bernard didn’t apologize before Justice Bruce Durno passed his sentence. She declined to say anything at all. “She committed ultimate abuse of trust in killing an innocent, young, and defenceless child,” Durno said. As Williams put it: “The ultimate act of murder was to break the loving bond of a father and son . . . the pain is as raw as the very first time my son slept over in his tiny urn with the night light on in his room.” http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/article/922274--mother-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-for-murdering-her-own-child

Ontario: April Luckese charged

A daycare owner has been charged with second-degree murder after a 14-month-old girl died following an incident at a Toronto-area daycare.

The child had been taken to hospital Wednesday night and police say she died today.

April Luckese, 35, was charged with aggravated assault and released on bail after the incident at the daycare in the QEW and Cawthra Road area.

She was re-arrested today and charged with second-degree murder.

An online posting for April's Daycare described it as a “safe, loving and nurturing home environment.”

“Mother of two boys offering child care in my home,” the posting, which has been removed from the website godaycare.com, read.

“Over 15 years experience working with kids. CPR and First Aid certified. Smoke-free home. Nutritious lunch and snacks provided. Fully fenced yard with sand box, slide and many other toys.”

The one review posted to the site read: “April's Daycare provides a safe, clean environment.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/mississauga-daycare-owner-charged-after-death-of-baby/article1861869/

FILICIDE (multiple): Ontario: Elaine Campione

Barrie, Ontario resident Elaine Campione drowned her two daughters, Serena, 3 and Sophia, 1, in the bathtub.  She confessed all to police and told them that her motivation was “hatred for and revenge against” her ex-husband, Leo.
So, back in November, a jury convicted her of first-degree murder.  She’s now looking at 25 years behind bars.
So, what’s so unusual about that other than the horrific nature of her crime?  Well, what’s so unusual is the conduct of the trial judge Alfred Stong post-verdict.

He said, “It is more than disconcerting to think that if Campione had not been so abused, so used and discarded as a person, her two daughters could still be alive…” Judge Stong was determined that even if it is Campione that gets locked up, Canadians would know that the real villain, morally speaking, is Leo Campione, the father of the dead girls (even though his alleged abusiveness was entirely based on his wife’s allegations and never proved), and it is actually the “discarded” Elaine Campione who is the victim.

Judge Stong felt such personal animus against the grieving father that he wanted to deny Mr. Campione and his parents their opportunity to read a victim-impact statement, standard practice even with mandatory- sentencing cases. He only relented under strong pressure from the prosecutor, who reminded the judge that the murdered girls had been “an extremely important part of [Mr. Campione's] life.”

The judge’s attitude is shameful. But what can you expect from someone who has been trained – literally, judges take structured learning programs steeped in feminist myths and misandric conspiracy theories – that women are never abusive or violent unless they have been driven to it by an abusive male. Judge Stong just could not get it into his head – he alluded to the “unimaginable facts of this case” – that a woman could kill her children without a motivation involving a controlling male that somehow drove her to the act.

What had Leo Campione done that was so heinous as to force his wife to destroy their two little girls?  Apparently he’d divorced her.  She claimed some non-specific form of abuse, but no evidence beyond her word was ever produced to back up her claims.
And yet that was all Judge Stong needed to all but convict, not the girls’ admitted killer, but their distraught father.  The only thing more remarkable than this judge’s hatred for his own sex is how prevalent his attitude is.  As Kay points out, it’s literally taught to judges, but my guess is that’s overkill; my guess is that they’d learn it without being formally taught.  That’s because the notion that women are witless tools of men is all around us.  Some days we breathe it like air.
Much of our concept of domestic violence (of which Judge Stong’s attitude is but one tiny offshoot) is based on exactly that.  According to that concept, men are taught from an early age to be violent toward women and to do so to control them; men’s violence toward women is winked at and “flies under the radar” of public policy and comment; women aren’t violent toward men, or, if they are, it’s OK because of the men’s bad behavior; therefore women who are violent need not be treated or punished for their behavior, but men, whether violent or not, must be.  So police are taught to arrest the man when there’s a DV complaint irrespective of the facts of the case.
Now, next to none of that reflects the actual realities of domestic violence.  What it reflects is the reality of radical feminist ideology about the sexes - that women don’t harm men or children.  You can read that any day of the week several times a day.
And what the Campione case shows, as have many others, is that that ideology, so divorced from known facts and rationality, has consequences.  Of course the intention behind the ideology was that it have consequences for men.  Those radical feminists have never made a secret of their desire to get as many men as possible separated from their wives, lovers and children and into prison if at all possible.
Whatever you may think of those motivations, the Campione case shows the even darker side of society’s dogged determination to excuse female violence.  Leo Campione is, after all, alive; it’s his kids who aren’t.
You see, Elaine Campione and her dangerous personality were well known to child welfare agencies, but they deemed her a “safe parent” anyway and two small children paid the ultimate price.
In the United States, mothers do twice as much abuse and neglect of children each year as do fathers.  Those figures from the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services remain the same year after year.  But when fathers’ rights advocates try to get even a semblance of equality in parenting time, they’re met with the cry “fathers are violent” from the anti-father crowd.  That claim is then dutifully swallowed hook, line and sinker by policy-makers.  You can’t make this stuff up.  Truly you can’t.
Kay adds,

Everyone involved in this fiasco should be locked up in a room and forced to review the case of Zachary Turner, the thirteen-month old baby who was drugged and drowned in Newfoundland in 2003 by his psychotic mother, Shirley, while she was out on bail for the third time on charges of murdering Zachary’s father. And after that forced to review the case of Toronto baby Jordan Heikamp, who in 2001 was starved to death by his mother under the blind eyes of the Catholic Children’s Aid Society (no jail time) and Toronto baby Sara Cao, abused to death in 2001 by her mother Elizabeth. Christie Blatchford, who covered that case, said the mother (again no jail time) “was treated by the system, and in the main by the media, as a pitiful [woman], worthy of sympathy…”
Little Sophia and Serena Campione did not have to die. They were allowed to die because of a belief system that denies the truth of human nature. Both men and women are capable of aggression.

http://www.fathersandfamilies.org/?p=11496

FILICIDE: Ontario: Mendieta

Dan Robson :  Dec 14 2010

Emmily Lucas was killed by either Erika Mendieta or Johnny Bermudez. On that much they agree.
But Crown and defence lawyers painted two starkly different portraits of the tragedy as they made their final arguments to Justice Nola Garton at Mendieta’s second-degree murder trial on Tuesday.
Emmily was beaten to the point of convulsions on Nov. 13, 2003. The 2-year-old’s body was covered in bruises. Her head and spinal column were severely injured. She died of brain trauma at Sick Kids 10 days later.
“Erika Mendieta did not kill her daughter,” defence lawyer Robin Parker told the court. “We say Johnny Bermudez killed Emmily Lucas.”
Bermudez, Mendieta’s former live-in boyfriend, has told the court he killed Emmily. As a witness he is protected by the Canada Evidence Act, so his testimony can’t be used to prosecute him.
The defence contends Mendieta left Emmily and the couple’s 18-month-old boy with Bermudez when she went to pick up her four other kids from school. Emmily cried. Bermudez beat her.
The Crown contends Bermudez is lying.
“His testimony is just another attempt to exonerate Mrs. Mendieta,” said Crown prosecutor Allison MacPherson, noting the pair met several times for coffee between Mendieta’s first and second trial.
“You don’t drink coffee with the man that murdered your baby,” MacPherson said.
“But you might if you had killed your baby and he was going to help get you out of it.”
Bermudez has refused to waive his protection under the Canada Evidence Act, and has never offered a sworn confession to police.
The Crown says Mendieta beat Emmily in fit of frustration and rage when she was late picking up the other children from school.
As evidence against her, prosecutors cite inconsistencies between Mendieta’s original police statements and her later testimony, as well as wiretapped conversations in which, they say, she appears to confess.
The defence has argued that too much of the wiretaps are inaudible and in dispute for that evidence to be credible.
If Garton is not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Bermudez did not kill Emmily, she must acquit Mendieta, Parker argued.
Mendieta’s first trial ended with a hung jury in 2009.
Her second trial spiraled into a judicial debacle last month, when the jury asked that a man be removed from the courtroom for making distracting faces during Mendieta’s testimony.
They didn’t know that the man was Paul Alexander, an assistant Crown attorney who prosecuted Mendieta at her first trial but was no longer on the case.
Garton declared a mistrial. Alexander’s actions are being investigated by the chief prosecutor, and he is no longer on in-court duty.
Garton then agreed to rule on the case alone, using evidence from the second trial. She will return with her verdict on Jan. 17.
“It’s going to be a tough month,” said Selena Lucas, Emmily’s one-time guardian and the sister of her biological father, Derrick Parra.
“We just have to wait,” she said, breaking into tears. “And that will be it.”
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/907120--crown-defence-make-final-arguments-in-mendieta-case